I found it in my chimney.
I find a lot in my
chimney. Sometimes the clumsy pigeons drop their bread and it bounces into our
laps. Sometimes spiders big as your hand drop down for a mosey around the
living room. This chimney was in my ‘office’ and eeeh, look at the muck in
here. Haven’t flicked a duster around in weeks. In a spirit of late-come
springcleanliness I decided that that pitcher’s mound of tapes in my dead
fireplace was just too ugly to ignore anymore and I had to shift them.
It wasn’t a task I
took to with any relish: not only was it punctuated with the odd shrill girlish
shriek of panic when a moth flew out or a woodlouse peered from under the
scattered cassettes, it bought back too many goddamn memories. Tapes were everything
to me once. Usually skint, somewhat nervous about any shops in which my
contemporaries gathered, tapes (of the kind that were killing music) were the
primary way in which I enjoyed pop…

New Years Resolutions, Winter 2004.
(From Plan B Magazine) all DJs watch kids, but this DJ hates them
Sometimes it seems people invite me out just so they can call me a miserable sod and blame me for ruining their evening. I wish they’d phone and tell me; drop notes. They should know by now that summer kills me, that my spirit dies when mercury rises. I only go out when I have to, but at the weekend I’d be skint as a badger’s runt if I didn’t DJ. So every Saturday night I press the flesh, and every Sunday morning I try and scrub myself dirty again. There’s these kids, see. They’re loyal. They’re on the dancefloor every Saturday night. Don’t ever let me live anywhere where Saturday night doesn’t matter. They dance to Pixies, Breeders, Pavement, Fugazi, Dinosaur Jr, Sonic Youth, Belle & Sebastian, The Smiths, Sebadoh, Mudhoney, Grandaddy. A circle of boys and girls committed to a certain pantheon that can’t be questioned but does strike one as terribly precious. One of them moans th…

single of
the momentREJOICE! We now have evidence both incontrovertible and danceable
that Sharleen Spiteri should stop writing songs with immediate effect! No, I’m
not talking about that single, the single that’s making summer stick in the
head even as what’s without turns so fresh and decaying. That single is Outkast’sever new-born ‘Prototype’ (BMG)
which very nearly makes ALL else mere interference…But don’t let me lose my
thread. JoJo’s ‘Leave (Get Out)’
(Mercury) is something Spiteri (and Dido, Joss Stone and the rest) has been dying
and trying to write all her life. Men can gather round in hesitant circles,
shifting from foot to foot while growling the words to ‘Sugar Kane’, ‘Waiting Room’,
‘Ace Of Spades’ or ‘My Generation’. Meanwhile, we all know there are records
that groups of women will surmount all class/age/race boundaries to dance and
sing together AT MEN.
Take my wife. Take ‘I Will Survive’, ‘Oh! Bondage’, ‘Silly
Games’, ‘I Heard It Through The Grapevine’ (both Marvi…

SINGLE OF
THE WEEKDISCO INFERNO SECOND
LANGUAGE EP (Rough Trade)
OH God, notes couldn’t spell out the score.
No band have robbed my speech and plundered my tears quite
as greedily as Disco Inferno have this year. And, in the current pop climate,
they grown more essential daily, a reason to believe rather than just another
band. So much British pop is living in now-fear: bands that talk about British
life from a rakish patronising distance of the “artist” and filter their “observations”
back through a haze of retro-retreat and sickening cowardice.
Disco Inferno are
beyond the poverty of such chicken-shits, they are the bravest band I’ve heard
in too long; they insist on rendition not representation, they create the sound
of living today there in your
headphones, pouring from your speakers, there is no distance, they are VIRTUAL
REALITY POP and they leave you gasping for air, clawing for words, shuddering
stunned in the overwhelming truth and beauty of the music surrounding you. …

Any film that manages to offend Bunuel & Antonioni has to be worth watching. "Fists In The Pocket" remains one of the most intense, hysterical, hard-boiled conjurations of lust, longing, disgust and boredom I've ever seen and so it becomes the debut in a new series wherein I shove films I love (and some of the best critique of those films) at you, and you lap it up like the slavering sub-human dog-creature you are, I am, we all are. Paola Pitagora is the new love of your life and Lou Castel your new favourite loon. Enjoy.

watch the film in full here

"This first film by Marco Bellocchio must surely be one of the most astonishing directorial débuts in the history of movies, yet it is hard to know how to react to it. The direction is exhilaratingly cool and assured, and the whole movie is charged with temperament, but the material is wild. It's about a bourgeois family of diseased monsters; epileptic fits multiply between bouts of matricide, fratricide, and …

DON'T you dare look like you’re not having a good time.
Modernity won’t stand for it. Nostalgia is only tolerable these days if
effectively neuteured into the eye-twinkling safety of much-missed sweets,
ephemera, a dim halcyon chortling at a time when things ‘mattered’ and you
‘cared’, a ferociously maintained media-wide intolerance for ever suggesting
that things mean any less now. Get the fuck over yourself old man. Everything
is retrievable, via this link or that. Quit blubbing.
But hold on. Nostalgia, as it’s phonetic adjacency to
neuralgia suggests, is a more complex, nagging, painful thing than that.
Nostalgia doesn’t have to be about yearning for what’s lost. None of us are
dumb enough or depressed enough to think our school days were the best years of
our lives, let alone wish ourselves back into the strange world of threat,
confusion and hyper-sensitivity that childhood was. Nostalgia can, though, be
about confrontation, can be about running against the brick wall of ti…

Cos I'm skint, nigh-on permanently. That's not gap-year/middle-class skint. That doesn't mean I've always got a few hundred in the bank. That means I'm frequently hunting pennies down the back of the sofa just to keep the power on and building up debt just to feed the kids. Want to keep the blog going, would be nice if it'd occasionally not just take up my time but give me food to eat. All/any largesse gratefully received. Thanks for reading.

"Cypress Hill: Do Believe The Hype" Neil Kulkarni, Melody Maker, 16 September 1995 "CYPRESS HILL's self-titled debut album changed the face of hip hop. Their second, Black Sunday, was the rap crossover LP of the early Nineties. But their soon-come third long-player, Temples Of Boom, is the business, da shiznit, the BOMB. So we sent NEIL KULKARNI first to Ladbroke Grove for an exclusive playback of the record with mainman DJ MUGGS, then to LA to meet the rest of the crew responsible for the next crucial stage in hip hop's development"

DJ MUGGS, INVENTOR of the Soul Assassins sound, mixmaster general for Cypress Hill and one of the most important producers in hip hop history, is sitting in a club in Ladbroke Grove next to a massive sound system and smoking the smelliest, phunkiest green shit ever. Muggs has invited me down to hear the new Cypress Hill LP, one that no one, not even in America, has heard yet. While I'm waiting to adjust to t…